I already mentioned a couple of things on the other post, but decided to create this post for some ideas how to deal with these.

I personally haven't played the mobile version of the game, so I might be biased that way a bit, but I have no hate towards the machines either. With PC you have so much leeway to mess around with things though. Do you have some sort of a longer term vision on how to deal with this? That is, one way to handle the separation of the devices is to just keep the PC version synced with the mobile version. That would be the obviously easier way for the developer, but it would mean the PC version would suffer from this. The other way is to separate the development lines to some degree, which would mean some work.

I don't know how the betas work, but could it be possible to have a more instant release line of PC versions available for a bit more general public? I mean people such as myself that are interested, have possibly something to offer and understand how things work (meaning that sometime stuff is broken for a while because I am running an experimental version of said software and I'm not afraid of running programs with kazillion command line arguments).

This idea of course leads to the idea of open source, but as much I like open source software, I think it might not be the best course of action here. Sometimes babies grow up more decent when raised by a single parent than by a bunch of dudes on the internet . That being said, how do you see this? Do you wish for more programmers? If you see the source as something you don't want to share with anybody, maybe you could share some relevant algorithms. Right now I'm thinking about the bug that makes some maps not load with higher amount of stars, of course you can get it fixed by yourself, but having more eyes on the problem wouldn't hurt. This also relates to the PC version; on PC we could create more advanced AIs, maybe map generation etc, if we just had a way how. In the longer run the feasible parts of this code could be integrated to the android version (and of course, before that, the main PC version).

Another thing I thought about were translations. I'm an over 30 year old computer geek, my stepson is 10ish aged rascal, I listen to stoner sludge, he listens to pop r'n'b, WE BOTH LOVE Galimulator! And one thing that would make this hobby better was if he could read the stuff without me translating it =). So, going back to the previous paragraph, how in general the text strings are put in the game? Could the community help you do the translations etc? (I understand this to some extent interferes with the "pay to name" thing, but it should be well possible to work around that.)

Anyways, these were some of the things I've been wondering. Don't feel rushed to reply. We got time, we deal with millennias here, our scale is cosmic .

I did consider the option of creating literally nightly builds of the PC version, where I compile whatever I've checked in the git repo, and I make this package optionally available for all paying PC users (I won't insult people by asking them to pay more to suffer my crashes). itch.io even has nice command line tools for this which I didn't get a chance to try yet.

Open sourcing the game I will not do, as it's really just my precious pet hobby project that I won't let anyone else touch I suspect that you have some coding experience yourself, so you may imagine that breaking out some algorithms and making them open source - while I would not have any issues with this, and it's actually a good idea in principle - would be rather challenging as they are not all neatly self-contained. I could not easily share my algorithm for generating galaxies without sharing also mock implementation of my classes for Star or Space :/

As for translations - yes part of the game has properly i18n:d strings and are translated to German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and Portugese. But many strings are hard coded Translations for the translatable parts are provided by volounteers. Which parts of the game do you think need translating? And which language?

I totally get the pet analogy =) I've been there myself, and I also think there are many cases where it's the best way to go for the game/project too. You can't replace love by manpower!

As for the algorithms, I see do see the difficulties here. What I suggest is that you could let us tinker with whatever is tinkerable with and elaborate on the specifics where you can. I'm probably not "an average user", but I'm sure there are others like me that like to giggle when looking at galimulator --ship-drunkness 150% etc. I think this would be a good place to point out that all these things I write about are mere suggestions or wishes, not demands or expectations .

We're Finnish so a Finnish translation would scratch that itch for me. I'm willing to do it too if you'd see that as something worthwhile. I don't know what's translatable and what is not, but if the Portuguese are happy with theirs, I'm sure it's enough for me!

I totally get the pet analogy =) I've been there myself, and I also think there are many cases where it's the best way to go for the game/project too. You can't replace love by manpower!

Well there's the bug fixing of course, that doesn't require a lot of love

As for the algorithms, I see do see the difficulties here. What I suggest is that you could let us tinker with whatever is tinkerable with and elaborate on the specifics where you can. I'm probably not "an average user", but I'm sure there are others like me that like to giggle when looking at galimulator --ship-drunkness 150% etc. I think this would be a good place to point out that all these things I write about are mere suggestions or wishes, not demands or expectations .

Oh I know demands when I see them, these are not demands, not enough ALL CAPS, exclamation marks or insults.

We're Finnish so a Finnish translation would scratch that itch for me. I'm willing to do it too if you'd see that as something worthwhile. I don't know what's translatable and what is not, but if the Portuguese are happy with theirs, I'm sure it's enough for me!

Ah, hello fellow Nordic person, I'm in Sweden! If you're in the neighbourhood give me a ping and I'll buy you a beer with my plentiful Galimulator earnings (so it will be a small, cheap beer).

But yes, if you take a look at the i18n folder, you can probably figure out how to work your magic, just create a Galimulator-strings_fi.properties file and you're good to go! Happy to accept it to the game official release

froller wrote:Ah, internationalization strings! I edit these at my $DAYJOB too, so I ought to be good to go. One question though: how do you change the language in the game itself? =) This is linux etc. setting:

Code:

-Duser.language=es -Duser.country=ES

on the command line, passed to either the galimulator executable or java -jar way of starting the game didn't work as expected.

Oh man now I have to reveal myself as not quite enough linux nerd to hang out in gentoo IRC channels Unfortunately I don't know how to do this, I remember doing this by some graphical settings interface in xfce.

I should probably add a setting file for this.

Caught a little bug trying to find the setting . when you click on "Rate the game!" or any other web link on linux it throws:

java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "sensible-browser": error=2, No such file or directory

I assume sensible-browser is some Android thingie? Stackoverflow seems to have a very good answer on how to multiplatform opening the browser if/when you're going to fix this.

This is actually the libgdx way of doing it, and this apparently wraps down to the "sensible-browser" symlink in linux. Again, interesting, I didn't know But I've seen sensible-browser used elsewhere by scripts etc who just want to launch some sensible browser on the platform. So it's not an Android thing, but it does seem to be a Debian thing:

Forgot to reply to this. Heh, I've been using linux for a long time, but I guess the learning still goes on. As for the solution, I don't know of a better way as I don't know the libgdx internals that well. Might be that there even exist a better way and my system doesn't just support the default because this is a pretty hacked together thing. As for the language setting, I realized I can just do some file renaming to get the Finnish to run as default on this machine . The translation itself isn't all done yet, as IRL keeps intervening, but I'll send it to you as soon as I get it done.

froller wrote:Forgot to reply to this. Heh, I've been using linux for a long time, but I guess the learning still goes on. As for the solution, I don't know of a better way as I don't know the libgdx internals that well. Might be that there even exist a better way and my system doesn't just support the default because this is a pretty hacked together thing. As for the language setting, I realized I can just do some file renaming to get the Finnish to run as default on this machine . The translation itself isn't all done yet, as IRL keeps intervening, but I'll send it to you as soon as I get it done.